In most species, from Escherichia coli to human, alterations in this system result in elevated frequencies of microsatellite length alterations.
The disruption of the hematopoietic cell lineages caused by the zTERT deficiency in our current study was observed in the absence of telomere length alterations, although both the apoptotic and cytopenic phenotypes in these mutants were still dependent, at least in part, upon p53 and Bcl-2 functions.
As we have already demonstrated, a zTERT knockdown induces both a dramatic reduction in the number of circulating blood cells and an inefficient developmental hematopoiesis, concurrent with the inhibition of telomerase activity in zebrafish in vivo, but in the absence of detectable telomere length alterations.
The telomere length alterations found in the relapsing lymphomas appeared to be independent of telomerase and rather represented clonal selection random at the telomere length level.
In other words, while length alterations of microsatellite sequences are usually phenotypically silent, they reflect a general defect in the DNA repair mechanism.
Using DNA fragment analysis we examined cMNR length alterations of these candidate genes in 19 MSI-H and 17 MSS colorectal cancer cell lines.
Unless selection strongly favors active functional elements with dynamic sequence length alterations, the HS indel affected regions may not pass the modified MK test.
In humans, minisatellites undergo frequent tract length alterations and repeat rearrangements during germline formation, as well as relatively rare somatic tract alterations (Buard et al. 2000; Jeffreys and Neumann 1997; Jeffreys et al. 1994).
The differences in effective focal length and refractive power (< 1 dpt), respectively, between the new model and Hughes´ model can be neglected when other influences are taken into account, such as tear film thickness and axial length alterations (1 dpt ≈10 µm difference in effective focal length).
